Edmund Burke

Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists, not in saving, but in selection.

If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is, however, another and an higher economy.

Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

It may be new to his Grace, but I beg leave to tell him that mere parsimony is not economy.

A particular order of things may be altered: order itself cannot lose its value.

Whatever I did at that time, so far as it regarded order and economy, is stable and eternal, as all principles must be.

Yet I was loaded with hatred for everything that was withheld, and with obloquy for everything that was given.

But their public service, though from their abilities unquestionably of more value than mine, in its quantity and in its duration was not to be mentioned with it.

I assert it, those gentlemen deserved their pensions, their titles,--all they had; and if more they had, I should have been but pleased the more.

In saving money I soon can count up all the good I do; but when by a cold penury I blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the growth of its active energies, the ill I may do is beyond all calculation.

I held it to be, in its consequences, the worst economy in the world.

I looked on the consideration of public service or public ornament to be real and very justice; and I ever held a scanty and penurious justice to partake of the nature of a wrong.

This line of conduct, whatever its merits might be, was partly owing to natural disposition, but I think full as much to reason and principle.

On the contrary, I have on an hundred occasions exerted myself with singular zeal to forward every man's even tolerable pretensions.

As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on the understandings of the people.

If I had not deemed it of some value, I should not have made political economy an object of my humble studies from my very early youth to near the end of my service in Parliament, even before (at least to any knowledge of mine) it had…

They are those on which I value myself the most: most for the importance, most for the labor, most for the judgment, most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit.

If I were to call for a reward, (which I have never done,) it should be for those in which for fourteen years without intermission I showed the most industry and had the least success: I mean in the affairs of India.

But, in truth, these services I am called to account for are not those on which I value myself the most.

On principle I did what was then done; and on principle what was left undone was omitted.

Government is made for the very purpose of opposing that reason to will and to caprice, in the reformers or in the reformed, in the governors or in the governed, in kings, in senates, or in people.

I have ever abhorred, since the first dawn of my understanding to this its obscure twilight, all the operations of opinion, fancy, inclination, and will, in the affairs of government, where only a sovereign reason, paramount to all forms…

I conceived nothing arbitrarily, nor proposed anything to be done by the will and pleasure of others or my own,--but by reason, and by reason only.

I do not claim half the credit for what I did as for what I prevented from being done.

I had a people to gratify, but not to inflame or to mislead.